Social Distancing Journal 10: Short Story: The Hidden Grove

This is a bit late today.

I got up at 7:00 in the morning and came downstairs and did all the proofing and formatting and… woke up.

So, in fact, it wasn’t done. Grumpy, I rolled over and got up and came downstairs and proofread and formatted and then… woke up again.

Third time apparently is the charm, but it’s unusual to have dreams that mundane. You can’t call them nightmares because it’s awful only once you’ve woken up and realize that all that theoretical work was a dream and it still has to be done. I have no idea why my subconscious is trying to give me ulcers. I mean… once? Okay. But twice?

As I’ve been doing, the story in .pdf download is here. The story has also been uploaded to the usual suspects, and I’ll add links as they go live; the book page is here.

***

I went into the store on Friday, as it’s still closed to the general public, and did the rest of the shelving. We’ve been leaving boxes for a couple of days before the books get processed, which… makes us look like we’re packing or unpacking, and we’re not terribly organized while doing it.

Some time ago, I started to muse about love, about the evolution of love, about love as endurance – which is a huge part of what we offer our very young children; children are a source of joy, but anyone who takes great joy out of waking up four times a night to, oh, change sheets when their young child has the stomach ‘flu would worry me.

But we do it because those young children are our responsibility. They are entirely and utterly dependent on us. There are no social boundaries because infants don’t have any. We don’t expect that they should.

And — I have continued to mull over this, and will probably talk a bit more about it in later posts (this is kind of a heads up).

***

Ontario has gone into phase one of a multiple phase reopening.

And our new cases moved up. We’ve never had the almost-zero caseload, and we’ve never really had the full testing/contact tracing paradigm in place. It’s now sunny, not cold, and its hotter, and people are probably a little sir crazy, so — as parks open up, that’s where they go, and not entirely in small numbers.

I’m not sure how, given rising cases, this is going to go. But: I’m still (mostly) working from home, as is my long-suffering spouse, and my sons have left the house to mow the lawn and take the trash/recycling to the curb.

If I were looking at losing the roof over my head or not being able to feed myself and my kids, I’d be heading back to work. If I was looking at losing my business and my future livelihood, I’d probably be heading back to work as well. At the moment, my thinking is this: I’m not essential. I’m not going to lose my house. So what I can do is: keep social distancing.

But: my PSA for the day is: at least in Ontario, hospitals are not swamped. People who do need emergency care are… not going. An article in the Toronto Star today had small interview snippets with doctors from the hospital closest to me. In one case, a woman had a had a stroke, but she was afraid to go to the hospital, and waited half a day.

The remedies for strokes, the treatments to lessen the damage, have to be done within 4 or 6 hours =/. People have had heart attacks, and have not gone to the hospital — and again, quick response can make a huge survival difference.

It’s no good if you avoid covid-19 and end up dying to something else that the hospitals and medical professionals do understand and can deal with. When hospitals are swamped (as they were in NYC), yes, they’re not great places to be. But in Canada, they’re not crushed in the same way. And when they aren’t, they have all the proper procedures in place and they are good at disinfecting things and keeping things separate.

So: if something happens that might need medical attention, call telehealth. If they tell you to go to emergency at the nearest hospital, please go. (The link is for Ontario, but it’s fairly simple to google telehealth and province and get similar numbers.)

ETA: fixed download link T_T